“Russia spying on the U.S. is not news,” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a top Trump ally. “It’s what they do. A lot is being made about something that’s already known. To all the people acting shocked, it’s as if they’re shocked there is gambling going on in a casino.”
.. “We’re not going back to the world of couriers and letter-writing; we’re going to continue to do things online,” he said. “There are ways to do it where you can manage risk, and that’s really what the goal should be here — to get to the point where we can have the efficiencies and the benefits and still be secure.”
.. As long as Trump openly doubts the intelligence community’s ability to accurately assign responsibility for cyberattacks, he could find it difficult to identify, fend off and retaliate against cyberattackers. He has publicly compared the intelligence community’s Russian hacking assessment to its erroneous determination that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction — a comparison Spicer repeated Sunday.
Trump Promises a Revelation on Hacking
“I just want them to be sure because it’s a pretty serious charge,” Mr. Trump said of the intelligence agencies. “If you look at the weapons of mass destruction, that was a disaster, and they were wrong,” he added, referring to intelligence cited by the George W. Bush administration to support its march to war in 2003. “So I want them to be sure,” the president-elect said. “I think it’s unfair if they don’t know.”
He added: “And I know a lot about hacking. And hacking is a very hard thing to prove. So it could be somebody else. And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.”
What’s really bugging Trump about Obama
Trump and his closest advisers are bothered by Obama’s critical comments and what they see as an effort to undermine the president-elect with last-minute policy changes.
Donald Trump can’t decide whether he thinks the transition of power is going well or not.
But he knows he doesn’t like how much attention Barack Obama is getting and is also bothered by what Trump and his closest advisers see as an active effort to poke the president-elect and undermine the incoming administration with last-minute policy changes on his way out of office
.. Most of all, though, Trump is frustrated with how Obama has poked him, by claiming in a podcast interview with former adviser David Axelrod that he could have beaten Trump had he been eligible to run again. (The president made that claim as part of an insistence that his kind of positive, hopeful campaign would have resonated with Americans, despite what Trump successfully tapped into.)
.. Trump was also irritated by Obama’s comments at Pearl Harbor on Tuesday afternoon in which he said, “even when hatred burns hottest, even when the tug of tribalism is at its most primal, we must resist the urge to turn inward. We must resist the urge to demonize those who are different.” These felt to Trump like direct criticism of the president-elect, according to two people close to Trump.
.. A senior administration official said Trump is wrong if he thinks Obama’s aim is to disrupt the transition by highlighting Russia’s role in the campaign, ordering the abstention on the Security Council vote on the Israel resolution and laying out his more globalist worldview as part of a speech at Pearl Harbor that was meant to address the right-wing nationalism going on all over the world.
“That is not evidence of a flawed transition,” the official said Wednesday afternoon. “That is evidence that we have starkly different opinions.”
.. The White House team is also frustrated with Trump’s policy statements — not just over what he did in regard to Israel, but by his hosting of a meeting with the Japanese prime minister in November, speaking by phone with the Taiwanese president despite the objections of China and beginning to map out a new framework of a relationship with Vladimir Putin.
Not only were these arranged without first informing the current administration, but they’ve created a level of confusion about American policy appearing to be driven by two different leaders at once.
Cyber Experts Cite Link Between DNC Hacks and Aggression Against Ukraine
Malicious software used in a hack against the Democratic National Committee is similar to that used against the Ukrainian military, a computer-security firm has determined, adding evidence to allegations that the hackers who infiltrated the DNC were working for the Russian government.
The malware used in the DNC intrusion was a “variant” of one designed to help locate the position of Ukrainian artillery units over the past two years, the security company, CrowdStrike, said in a report released Thursday. The artillery units were deployed to defend Ukraine following Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014.
CrowdStrike concluded that the malware used against the Ukrainian military was designed by a hacker group known to security experts as Fancy Bear.
.. “This establishes a clear link between Fancy Bear and the Russian military,”